Editorial

Our Bad

Pervasive Wickedness & What We Must Say About It
by James Hitchcock

The definition of a decadent society might be one in which private vices
become public, not merely in the sense of becoming known, but in the sense
that the leaders of the society govern in accord with their vices. Sins of
the flesh, traditionally thought of as sins of weakness and sources of shame,
become sins of pride.

Some sins of the flesh especially. Episcopal Bishop V. Gene Robinson of New
Hampshire has precipitated a bitter and possibly fatal division within the
Anglican Communion by asserting his right to serve as a father in God even
though he left his own wife and children to live with another man. His elevation
was presented by himself and many others as an act of justice and an expression
of the true gospel.

Paul Shanley, a Boston Catholic priest, for years had a “ministry” to
homosexuals in which, in common with many active dissidents against church
teaching, he castigated his church for its “rigidity” and “insensitivity.” (He
turned out to be a serial molester of young males.)

Since the 1960s all of Western culture has been in crisis, suffering nothing
less than a transvaluation of values, doubt concerning the very foundations
of the moral beliefs of many centuries, to the point where militant skepticism
dominates public discourse and places all traditional beliefs on the defensive.
Most of the institutions that embody those beliefs are now weak and divided,
to a great degree vulnerable to the very spiritual illnesses they exist in
order to heal.

Various Protestant denominations have had more than their share of clerical
misconduct at high levels, and it is necessary to go back to the eighteenth
century to find misconduct by Catholic clergy, including bishops, on the scale
of today. Catholic Bishop Patrick Zeman of Santa Rosa (California) discovered
that one of his priests was embezzling parish funds and used that information
to obtain sexual favors from the priest, while Catholic Archbishop Rembert
Weakland of Milwaukee, a strong supporter of feminism who denigrated the pro-life
movement, used diocesan funds to pay blackmail to a male lover. All these men
have their loyal supporters.

A scandal-hungry media may aggressively expose the sins of church leaders
(the media are noticeably less eager to expose the extent of sexual abuse practiced
by public school teachers), but Christians ought to consider the possibility
that in our day some of the people who have risen to positions of spiritual
authority really are exceptionally wicked, because wickedness, like goodness,
is nourished by the society that surrounds it.

Disordered Times

Disordered times allow wicked people to rise, even as their rise further
disorders the societies over which they preside. Such societies reward, even
if only by default, a contempt for accepted standards of conduct and even unprincipled
ruthlessness. In a disordered society, ordinary vices endemic to human nature—ambition,
egotism, greed, lust, cowardice—are magnified, so that men who might
in stable times be able to fulfill their responsibilities in spite of their
vices instead allow those vices to determine the way in which they exercise
their offices.

Wicked people come to power by exploiting the moral weaknesses of others
in numerous ways, playing one vice against another and not even stopping short
of a kind of blackmail. A wicked leader, tacitly or otherwise, encourages others
to lower their own moral standards, to give in to whatever their own sinful
tendencies happen to be. Otherwise moral people become confused to the point
where they cannot even fully acknowledge obvious evil, much less resist it,
and “judgmentalism” becomes the only sin.

Sexual behavior is the best index of the moral life of a society, because
it is the best way of gauging the degree to which people exercise self-discipline.
(Closely related to sexual behavior is the use of money, and it is now almost
inevitable that people in responsible positions who abuse sex turn out to be
abusing money as well.) Particularly important is the point, long since crossed
in the West, at which private vices, always with us, become acts one can claim
or even indulge in public. It is this point that wicked leaders wish their
societies to cross.

And thus wicked leadership above all asserts itself in the often fanatical
promotion of things that destroy the spiritual community, more often than not
so that the leader can protect his own vices by undermining genuine spiritual
authority. The extent of their success can be seen in perhaps the most prevalent
moral disorder among ordinary, well-meaning church members: their willingness
to assume that those whose actions do palpable spiritual damage are also well-meaning.
A kind of moral cowardice—perhaps the ultimate spiritual sloth—requires
believers to minimize, even to excuse entirely, the menaces that confront them,
in order to maintain their own peace of mind.

Evil people exploit good people by persuading them that it is wrong to call
evil by its name. Perhaps the greatest challenge now facing Christians is,
even while remaining conscious of the fact that absolutely everyone stands
under judgment, to see evil for what it is and to see wicked people for who
they are, and to name them. •

James Hitchcock is Professor emeritus of History at St. Louis University in St. Louis. He and his late wife Helen have four daughters. His most recent book is the two-volume work, The Supreme Court and Religion in American Life (Princeton University Press, 2004). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.

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Touchstone is a Christian journal, conservative in doctrine and eclectic in content, with editors and readers from each of the three great divisions of Christendom—Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox.

The mission of the journal and its publisher, The Fellowship of St. James, is to provide a place where Christians of various backgrounds can speak with one another on the basis of shared belief in the fundamental doctrines of the faith as revealed in Holy Scripture and summarized in the ancient creeds of the Church.